Pentagon’s plans for a spy service to rival the CIA have been pared back

The Pentagon has scaled back its plan to assemble an overseas spy service that could have rivaled the CIA in size, backing away from a project that faced opposition from lawmakers who questioned its purpose and cost, current and former U.S. officials said.

Under the revised blueprint, the Defense Intelligence Agency will train and deploy up to 500 undercover officers, roughly half the size of the espionage network envisioned two years ago when the formation of the Defense Clandestine Service was announced.

The previous plan called for moving as many as 1,000 undercover case officers overseas to work alongside the CIA and the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command on counterterrorism missions and other targets of broad national security concern.

Instead, the training schedule has been cut back, and most of those involved will be given assignments that are more narrowly focused on the DIA’s traditional mission of gathering intelligence for the Defense Department.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as it is purely external looking and not a domestic focused entity. From the article, it does seem to be a solely external looking body.

What I find particularly interesting is that the very idea of the creation of this entity may indicate some mission/event that the Pentagon had relied on the CIA for, but the CIA did not deliver fully and/or on time. In essence, similar to the events in the late 70s during the aborted rescue of American hostages on Iran that led to the creation of the Intelligence Support Activity (ISA, or the Activity).

When the plan for the rescue mission was being formulated, the senior officers on the Army that were assembling the Delta Force mission had asked.for a.slew of.information. Information that was hard to get from the CIA at first, until somewhat later on when the guys at Langley realized that the mission was in fact going ahead. The information then provided was extremely detailed, including granular data such as the direction the windows turned at the embassy. This made the army guys realize that the CIA had been sitting on a lot of detail (allegedly because they didn't want to give sensitive information and use sources until they were certain the mission would be given a go-ahead).

Following the debacle at the desert refueling site, where a marine helicopter crashed into a parked plane and led to the whole mission getting flushed, several lessons learned were compiled. These led to the creation of several groups, such as the Army's SOAR (elite helicopter pilots that were totally dedicates to special missions so that they didn't have to rely on ill prepared pilots from other service branches), Seal Team Six (a sister group to Delta that at the time would look at tier 1 ops focusing on marine assets, eg a hijacked cruise ship or an oil rig captured by terrorists, while Delta would continue focusing on the likes of a captured aircraft or building), and of course, the ISA (for the Army to have a special dedicated and in house intelligence gathering ability that would provide fast and fully accessible intelligence).

Since then the ISA has become a premier intelligence department, and has more than proven it's usefulness and value. Many of the bad guys may not have heard of the Activity, but they should be more fearful of those guys than they are.of even Delta or.Devgru.

Anyways, it is possible that something happened that made the Pentagon push for their own CIA independent unit. We will obviously never know what, but this is quite likely the case. I don't think it is just a matter of getting money because the Pentagon already has many black book projects that are hidden from Congressional oversight, thus it must be a real reason/need.

Anyways, if the DIA is anything like the ISA, and it is fully outward looking, then it can be a force for good.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.